The gardener, incriminated by the famous registration “Omar kill me”, had been sentenced in 1994 for the murder of Ghislaine Marchal, which he denies. The progress of science now allows to analyze DNA traces discovered on the crime scene.
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These are surely the most appraised inscriptions of French criminological history. The blood letters drawn on the two doors of the wine cellar and the boiler room next to the corpse of Ghislaine Marchal accusing his Gardener Omar Raddad of his murder, on June 24, 1991, may be examined again. Following a request lodged in June, the Examining Committee of the Review Court today ordered “additional information”. A first step before a possible referral to the court herself, who will have the last word on the organization of a new trial, a rare event in France. Omar Raddad had been sentenced in 1994 to eighteen years of imprisonment.
This is the logical continuation of the revelation of the synthesis note of the genetic analyzes, from the report rendered by Dr. Olivier Pascal at the Nice Prosecutor’s Office in 2016. Half-victory: The Reviewer, Before deciding on the admissibility of the application, wants “additional information” to “inform the investigating commission on the scope of the marks of syntheses established by Mr. Laurent Brenials”.
In this summary note, permitted by the progress of science, the expert had noted the presence of several traces of an unknown masculine DNA and concluded in favor of a deposit of these fingerprints at the time of the facts, and not a later “pollution”, especially by the investigators. More importantly: samples on seals would have highlighted traces of “exploitable” DNAs. They do not match the genetic profile of the former gardener. In total, four fingerprints belonging to four men, including two perfectly exploitable and two other partially. They were found on two doors and a chevron of the crime scene, where had been written with the blood of the victim the inscriptions “Omar kill me”, emblematic of this case, and “Omar t”.
“I felt such relief in his voice”
This new request, authorized by a law passed in June 2014 which relaxes the criteria for the revision of a trial, was surely the last possible use to resolve this third-year old file. Omar Raddad and his family know it. Thursday, December 16, the former gardener did not travel from his Toulonnais apartment to Paris to hear justice render his decision. “He was too afraid of not standing a refusal,” says Sylvie Noahovich, his lawyer. The 59-year-old man preferred to stay at home, surrounded by his family, waiting for the call. “I felt such a relief in his voice. He was moved, happy, it had been a long time since I had heard him like that,” she says.
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